Blog #43:
Cognitive Dissonance

Since
being held in both Attica and Southport Special Housing Units (SHU) for
the past several months (12/5/16 to 3/21/17), each week, once a day,
a psychologist stops at each cell asking its inhabitant, “How are
you doing? Are you feeling all right?” When the prisoner responds “I’m
Okay,” the psychologist moves on to the next cell.

I have
witnessed and experienced this weekly ritual and responded with the customary “I’m
Okay,” and contemplated on the routine of it all. This form of
crisis management, if there were to be a crisis, attempts to discover
predictors before a crisis manifests, and lends thought to the origin
of the need for such management.

How should
I delineate the origins of this man-made-created dilemma, perhaps as
far back as the advent of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 (ending private
holding of slaves, appropriating and inventing its “lawful” practice
by the State), when slavery and involuntary servitude were codified into
law for those “… duly convicted of a crime.” Maybe
it would be best to consider the slaves in the cotton fields, and a psychologist
one day, each week, traversing the plantation asking each slave is she/he “all
right,” “how are you feeling”. Or even further back,
as Afrikans are being piled in the bowels of slave ships, that would
be the perfect place to pose this crisis management question.

Indeed,
for many this thinking would seem ludicrous or cynical, knowing a need
exists to address this man-made-created problem because there are prisoners
who succumb to the mentally debilitating conditions of 23 to 24 hours
locked in a prison cell. Just as some Afrikan slaves during the Middle
Passage jumped overboard to their watery demise, some 21st Century slaves
commit suicide in their cold desolate cells.

Nonetheless,
the question to be contemplated is not the asking of the prisoner/slave
how he or she is doing or are they all right (?); rather, the question
needs to be asked of the person(s) (prison guards/administrators/ society)
who lock other human beings in cells 23 or 24 hours—are they Okay?
Don’t ask the enslaved, ask the enslaver; for it is the choice
of one’s humanity or lack thereof, that cultivates, grants and
permits this kind of brutal soul-snatching treatment that needs to be
questioned. The laws and regulations that permit the caging of human
beings need to undergo psychological evaluations to determine if they
are humane in their totality.

The social
order and criminal laws demand the punishment of imprisonment at a greater
socio-psychological and moral determinant than the obvious deterrent
to criminality—i.e., redistribution of wealth to eliminate poverty,
drug and alcohol addictions, unemployment, dilapidated schools and homelessness.
It is well established the problem of crime and punishment leading to
imprisonment is not intractable. There are a plethora of studies that
offer irrefutable cause and effect solutions. Yet, given the availability
of these studies, the criminal (in)justice system continues to deliberately
operate as big business, exploiting the human misery created by the collective
failure to truly address Americans’ historical and racial pathology.
Such social and racial pathology has now become rooted and metastasized
in the White House, consolidating and morphing into a dangerous enterprise
of xenophobic empire building.

But I
digress from the principle issue under discussion. This writing was triggered
on 3/15/17, as I was meditatively pacing in this Shawangunk SHU cell
for about an hour. It is one of my coping mechanisms after completing
350 push-ups and other exercises. A middle-aged good looking Black woman
appeared in front of the cell, announcing she is Mrs. Buchanan, a psychologist,
asking me the expected questions. As I answered, “I’m Okay,” “No,
I’m not feeling suicidal,” a smile crossed my face. She observed “You’re
smiling,” nodded her head and walked away. She did not ask what
I was smiling about, whether I found her amusing, and I can only imagine
what she conjured—but it’s safe to say it wasn’t of
me being suicidal. If she only knew my thinking was “Are you Okay?” for
even asking me that question! Are you part of the problem, or part of
the solution?

What I’ve
experienced in the last several months in SHU and endured for 45 years
of imprisonment, is symptomatic of a much larger societal problem, as
here contemplated and shared. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans
suffers from an acute malady of cognitive dissonance to the severe detriment
of the poor and oppressed, prisoners included.